According to Salvatore (2012), regulation is the result of pressure-groups action and results in laws and policies to support business and to protect consumers, workers, and the environment. Salvatore (2012) goes on to describe that starting with the Sherman Act of 1890, a number of antitrust laws were passed to prevent monopoly or undue concentration of economic power, protect the public against the abuses and inefficiencies resulting from monopoly or the concentration of economic power and maintain a workable degree of competition in the U.S. economy. First, lets discuss regulations and the ways that government has been able to restrict competition. Government regulation has four main purposes, preventing abuses, protecting consumers, limiting negative externalities and promoting competition. These regulations includes things like licensing, restrictions on price competition, as well as patents. Regulations will also help ensure economic stability by keeping the unemployment rate low as well as keeping the inflation rate low. A license is often required for a business just to operate and remain open. A business such as TV, radio stations, child care services; professions like medicine and law; and trades such as plumbers, electricians and real estate brokers as well as dietitians and taxi cab drivers all need a license in order to operate. The government requires license of these businesses and professions in order to protect the public against things like fraud and harm. The government also has restrictions on price competition in order to guarantee parity in pricing in areas such as trucking rates, agriculture, shipping rates and airline fares. The Robinson-Patman Act was enacted in 1936 during the Great Depression in order to protect small independent retailers against large chain stores especially those in the drug and grocery industries. This was done mainly because large chain stores were able to obtain more favorable terms with their suppliers by being able to maximize their use of excessive quantity. The future of the small independents was basically on life support during the Great Depression mainly due to the small independents inability to compete against large chain stores. The American people called for broad support requesting legislation which would compel suppliers, no matter the size of the buyer to treat them all on a fair and equal basis. After almost 40 years the Robinson-Patman Act still remains controversial. Not too long after being drafted it became a law. Because of its many different confusing sections it resulted in many different interpretations by the courts. Supreme Court Justice Harlan classified the Robinson-Patman Act as being “singularly opaque and illusive statute” (Hall & Phillips, 1963). Supreme Court Justice Clark, stated that the “precision of expression is not an outstanding characteristic of the Act” (Clark, 1963). Another regulation by the federal government is a patent and is considered to be the intellectual property right to an inventor. As stated in 35 US Code 154(a)(1), every patent contains “a grant to the patentee ... of the right to exclude others from making, using, offering for sale, or selling the invention throughout the United States or importing the invention into the United States...” ("What are your," 2011). Just like the restrictions on price competition the difficult thing concerning obtaining a patent is that large companies end up holding so many patents on certain products on certain products that a large firm company will completely dominate the field. When looking back during the 1800s, there were several large companies that were known as trusts. These large companies controlled sections of the United States economy. These companies included businesses like sugar, steel, railroads and oil. The two famous trusts during this period were Standard Oil and U.S. Steel. These two companies were considered to be monopolies because they controlled the supply of their respective products as well as the price of the product. When one company controls the entire industry and has no competition consumers and small businesses have no choice from where they are able to buy the product. This forces prices to go through the roof and quality of the product will begin to suffer because the monopolist has no priority to improve quality. This ended up causing hardship for Americans and prevented any prosperity from occurring. However, this whole time the rich businessmen became richer and richer. This caused the American public to become angry and they began to demand the government to step in and take some sort of action. The United States Congress passed several laws and Theodore Roosevelt became the first President of the United States to take action as he broke up many of the trusts that existed by enforcing the new “antitrust” laws. The goals of the “antitrust” laws was to protect consumers. This was done by promoting competition in the within the United States marketplace. The laws passed by the United States Congress helped promote competition among all companies by outlawing any sort of unfair methods of competition. The first of these laws is the Sherman Act. The Sherman Act is the United States’ oldest antitrust law. It was passed in 1890 and the law makes it illegal for any competitor to make agreements with each other that would limit competition. The 51st Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act which was named for Senator John Sherman of Ohio. This law is intended to stop any trusts and monopolies that attempt to operate by restraining trade or commerce. Senator John Sherman said that the statute "does not announce a new principle of law, but applies old and well recognized principles of common law" (Rubenstein). The one thing the Sherman Act failed to do is specify exactly what sort of conduct is prohibited even though it made it illegal to monopolize or restrain trade through collaborations. This lack of specifity left it federal courts to decide how to shape or even change the law. For a short period of time after its passing, the Sherman Act was not widely applied. Even when it was applied it was done so in minor efforts. In 1895 the Supreme Court maintained a strict interpretation with the case of U.S. v. E.C. Knight Co. The Supreme Court ruled the Sherman Act did not apply to a trust composed of major sugar producers. At the time the E.C. Knight Co. controlled nearly all of the United States sugar refining capacity. The Supreme Court stated the law did not extend to manufacturing companies. Another law passed in order to help regulate businesses was the Clayton Act. The Clayton Act was passed in 1914. With the Sherman Act already in place and trusts beginning to break up, certain business practices in the United States were beginning to change. Some companies realized that merging with each other would be a way to allow them to control prices and production. The companies decided that instead of forming trusts, they would unite into a single company. This is why the Clayton Act was passed, it is meant to help protect consumers by preventing these sort of mergers or acquisitions. In 1914 the United States Congress created a new federal agency by passing the Federal Trade Commission Act. The United States Congress created this new federal agency in order to look for unfair business practices. This new agency was given authority to investigate and stop any unfair methods of competition and deceptive practices by companies. Today, both the Department of Justice Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition end up enforcing these three core federal antitrust laws. Both of these agencies talk to each other before any investigation is opened. This is done in order to decide which agency will investigate the facts and work on any particular case. Although each of the agencies has developed a specific expertise within certain industries. Also, today every state has their own antitrust laws. These antitrust laws are enforced by the state’s attorney general. Each state has an office in their respective state capitol that ends up helping consumers or businesses who feel like they could be hurt when businesses don’t compete fairly. The purpose of antitrust laws is not to protect businesses from being aggressive when competing against each other. The competition between businesses is tough and the unfortunate effects of that is that sometimes businesses will fail. The United States federal government regulates private enterprise in a number of different ways and these regulations fall into two categories. When it comes to economic regulation, it is should directly or indirectly control prices. The government has traditionally tried to prevent monopolies such as an electric utility company from raising their prices to levels other than ensuring they have reasonable profits. Following the Great Depression the government came up with a complex system that stabilized prices for agricultural goods. Other industries such as trucking and airlines sought and successfully were able to regulate themselves in order to limit harmful price-cutting. Another type of an economic regulation is a antitrust law. A antitrust law seeks to strengthen market forces in order to prevent direct regulation. The United States government have used antitrust law in order to prohibit certain practices or even mergers that limits competition. The United States government will also choose to regulate private companies in order to achieve certain social goals. These regulations are in place in order to protect the public's health and safety as well as maintain a clean and healthy environment. For example, the EPA seeks to control air and water pollution, the FDA is required to ban harmful drugs from the consumer and OSHA protects workers from dangers that may occur in the job place. During the 1980’s, President Ronald Reagan and his administration relaxed certain rules to protect consumers, the environment and workers. President Reagan argued that too many regulations interfered with free enterprise. President Reagan related these regulations to actually increasing the costs of doing business and this in turn contributed to rising inflation. However, there were still many consumers that continued to voice concerns about specific trends that prompted the government to issue new regulations including those involving environmental protection. The American consumer sometimes turned to the courts when they feel government officials are acting quickly enough on certain issues. For example, consumers and then eventually the government sued tobacco companies because of the health risks of cigarette smoking. This lawsuit eventually led to a financial settlement provided directly to states from the tobacco companies which included long-term payments that would cover medical costs in order to treat smoking-related illnesses. In todays industry of professional sports certain actions which involved antitrust have actually helped shape the specific sport. These cases have focused mainly on issues of antitrust of the professional player. According to the Antitrust Bulletin, the issue of whether sports leagues are protected from antitrust attack by the labor exemption has arisen primarily in cases challenging league rules or devices designed to restrict the unfettered movement of veteran free agent players from one team to another when their contracts with the former team expired (Roberts, 1997). According to an article in the U.S. News & World Report some officials consider the way sports leagues and their teams are ran to be a monopoly. There are those who would like to propose breaking up sports leagues into completely separate businesses similar to the way AT&T was broken up into the Baby Bells. Others propose government regulation, such as a federal sports commission that regulates ticket prices, team relocation, salaries and the like because it has gotten to the point where huge amounts of tax money are aiding and abetting the behavior of an industry that is gouging its consumers (McGraw, 1998). Recently the Federal Trade Commission had been battling against some drug companies that the FTC had considered to be using devious tactics. The FTC felt as if the drug companies were paying their competitors in order to delay placing cheaper generic versions of their specific brand name drugs out on the market. This tactic results in the consumer having to spend more money on the name brand drugs. The United States Supreme Court reached a decision that would allow the FTC to bring antitrust charges against the companies using these tactics provided it did not keep a generic drug off the market beyond the brand named drug patent life. Another recent issue that had made big news is when the FTC found that Google was not violating any antitrust or anticompetition laws. This cleared the way for Google to continue to dominate the field of Web searches. Google’s competitors felt like the FTC ended up looking at the wrong thing which led to their decision in favor of Google. Google’s competitors feel the FTC should have been looking at whether actions by Google actually harmed their real customers which are the companies that pay to advertise on Google’s site instead of whether it harmed those who use Google as a search engine.

References
Clark, J. (1963, February 18). United states, appellant, v. national dairy products corp. et al.. Retrieved from https://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/US/372/372.US.29.18.html

Hall, G. R., & Phillips, C. F. ,. J. (1963). Good faith, discrimination, and market organization. Southern economic journal, 30(2), 144-155. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1055961

McGraw, Dan. (1998, July 13). Big League Troubles. U.S. News and World Report, 125, (2), 40-46.

Roberts, Gary R. (1997, Fall). Brown v. Pro Football, Inc.: The Supreme Court it Right for the Wrong Reasons. Antitrust Bulletin, 42 (3), 595-639.

Rubenstein, K. (n.d.). Antitrust in the u.s.: simple laws, infinite uses. Retrieved from http://jerrykohn.pbworks.com/w/page/36885093/

Salvatore, D. (2012). Managerial economics in a global economy. Oxford New York: Oxford University Press.

What are your patent enforcement rights? . (2011). Retrieved from http://www.generalpatent.com/patent-enforcement